Saturday 10 November 2001 06.51 EST
First published on Saturday 10 November 2001 06.51 EST

Eugenio Granell, who has died aged 88, was the last Spanish surrealist. His legacy is the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to the movement, the Fundación Granell, opened in 1995 in his home town of Santiago de Compostela, and holding 600 of Granell's paintings along with works by Picabia, Duchamp, Man Ray and Breton.

Growing up in Galicia's famous cathedral city, Granell wrote and painted from childhood, before studying music at the Madrid Conservatory. The Spanish civil war (1936-1939), in which he fought with the independent socialist POUM, cut short his musical career. He turned to painting while in exile in the Dominican Republic, a refuge in the 1940s to a number of surrealist artists. In the 1950s, he lived in Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Los Angeles, before settling in New York in 1957. He did not return to Spain until 1985.

A strong draughtsman, Granell's early and later paintings were distinctive for their bright, vivid colours. He composed his canvases in a cubist style, and his themes were influenced by the nature and indigenous symbolism of the Americas. He painted Indian heads, and enigmatic half-animal, half-human figures, which distorted reality in an acidly humorous way. "Humour," said Granell, "is our only defence against tedium."

His most famous period, however, was the decade from the mid-1950s, when his paintings became more abstract and lost their characteristic colour to autumnal and watery tones. Associated in New York with the Phases Movement, Granell showed in numerous group and one-man exhibitions at the Bodley Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, which owns several of his paintings. In 1989, he had a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid.

Granell was also a poet, essayist and novelist, publishing 15 books in all. His first book of stories was El hombre verde (The Green Man, 1944) and Lo que sucedió (What Occurred), a book he illustrated and designed himself, won Mexico's Don Quijote novel prize in 1969. From the mid-1960s until retirement, he was professor of Spanish literature at Brooklyn College.

Informing Granell's explosive, many-sided creative talent was a profound political commitment, dating from 1928. He joined the Trotskyists while doing military service, and, with his brother Julio, went with Andreu Nin's Izquierda Comunista when the Trotskyists were excluded from the Communist parties and became a founding member of the POUM in 1935.

Though he moved away from revolutionary Marxism after the civil war, Granell defended to the end of his life the Russian revolution and Trotsky's critique of its degeneration. He was particularly hostile to the Spanish writers and painters, such as Alberti and Picasso, who had sided with Stalin: "To have collaborated by silence, cowardice or fear in such horrendous crimes is the greatest humiliation of the intellectual class since it existed," he said.

In later years, Granell came to believe that the working-class's greater material comforts had made socialist revolution out-moded. He continued to berate injustice and patriotism in provocative, witty articles and interviews. He loved living in New York, but was particularly critical of American racism.

Granell's view of art was inseparable from his Marxism. He defined surrealism as "Freedom, poetry and love ... a way of seeing more and better, without restrictions or barriers of logic". He saw Trotsky as the Bolshevik who most defended freedom of scientific research and artistic creation, against the Stalinist concept of proletarian art. "There is no proletarian or bourgeois art; there is art or there is not art. You can't have a man who plays the trumpet in a proletarian manner and another who plays in a bourgeois manner," he wrote earlier this year.

Short and slim, smoking continuously, Granell loved polemic. He was liked for his happy personality, humour and impassioned conversation. He is survived by his wife Amparo Segarra, two daughters and a son.